This is a comprehensive introduction to all sorts of telecommunications (mainly telephone regulation) issues. It's probably a bit much for the novice; something like Stuart Benjamin's Telecommunications Law and Policy is probably a better match there. But, if you want all the details, this is definitely the place to go.

There isn't anything else like this on the market. It contains all the FCC and court and DOJ lore on telecom from the beginning of the century through the 1996 Act up to the present. The spicy bits apparently were written by pundit Peter Huber (who isn't identified in the listing above).

This book gives the novice a very accessible route to the world of telecommunications and gives the expert a very comprehensive reference book. Very highly recommended. The FCC wants universal service? This book is universal in and of itself.

I disagree with the previous reviewer's comments that the book is largely of use to the legal professioin. I find the law case serves as a great backdrop to understanding science and judging scientific claims. Many great principles are explained in this book.

Since O.J. Simpson's double homicide trial acquainted everyonewith the concepts of RFLP and PCR testing for DNA, the issue ofscience in courtroom has been on the frontburner. As Foster and Huber demonstrate, however, this issue has had a long and controversial history.

Using the mass tort litigation involving the drug Bendectin, which was used to treat morning sickness but became suspected of causing birth defects, the authors make a key point: the scientific method is not entirely compatible with the legal method.

The scientific process consists of formulating a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis to see if it can be disproven, and repeating the testing process until one becomes convinced that the hypothesis must be true. (Or realizing that it is false, if a test disproves it.)

This means, however, that a scientific witness can be neutralized somewhat through clever (but artful) questioning of the sort, "Isn't it possible that . . . ."

There are no equations in this book, but there is some discussion of statistics, particularly as used in epidemiology. The mathematical concepts are not at all difficult, and well worth thinking about.

Although non-lawyers can appreciate this book, it is really of use to lawyers in mass tort cases where scientific evidence is used to prove causality issues.

Foster and Huber use the litigation over the pregnancy drug Bendectin to explain the ways in which science is used and misused to "prove" cases. In the case of Bendectin, there was no conclusive medical evidence proving that the drug caused birth defects. Rather, there was a statistical association between the use of the drug and birth defects. Does this prove that Bendectin causes birth defects?

It might or it might not. The field of epidemiology attempts to answer the question by eliminating other possible explanations for the association. Various techniques of epidemiology include blind (or double-blind) testing, data analysis, and so on.

Foster and Huber demonstrate that the scientific techniques are not entirely conducive with the standards of modern litigation. For example, scientists generally do not speak of "proving" an assertion; rather, they "falsify" it. That is, they attempt to disprove it -- it is usually easier to show that something is not true, since you only need to find one example. When an assertion has withstood repeated attempts to falsify it, it becomes generally accepted.

This has important ramifications for litigation, however. Litigation -- particularly mass torts -- requires a "yes" or "no" answer: in the scientific opinion of the expert witness, does Bendectin cause birth defects? The expert will of course have explained his or her analysis, but in the end, that analysis must be boiled down into a yes or no answer, regardless of the suitability of such an intellectual liposuction.

In summary, this is a fascinating book if you are interested in these sorts of issues. Although the book covers science and scientific inquiry, it does not require a significant amount of scientific knowledge.

Huber's book is a frightening look at what happens when critical, life-influencing decisions for our society are made by a group of people (juries) who's most analytical candidates are rejected in order to provide plaintiffs and their counsel with windfalls.

The concept that all ideas deserve equal attention and truth or falsehood will always be shown in court is flat-out wrong. This book is the "how." Read "Atlas Shrugged" for the why.

A must read for any person involved with the product realization process. The only way to protect you and your company against junk science when you are hauled into court with your product or service is to understand that junk science exists and to be prepared to provide real and concrete data to support the validity of your design, not simply close your eyes to their opinions and say "There is nothing wrong".

Several of the companies mentioned in the book were severally damaged by what this books talks about. A number of excellent products have been taken of the market never to come back and more will never see the light of day because of those who have no other desire that to either make money or push their unsubstantiated agendas have been allowed to take advantage of our tort court systems in the USA.

Yes, some not so good products also have been taken off the market but for the wrong reasons. This too keeps other excellent products locked away in the closet.

In our increasingly technological world lack of understanding in science and technology along of this issues by both sides of the junk science debate will only result in more witch-hunts and more tilting at windmills.

To be successful in life one cannot simply allow them selves to be a victim, we must understand the world around us. No matter how good it really is, everything has a cost, everything has a dark side, but even with these costs and risks that do exist we must address the real issues and not simply make someone pay for the downside of life just because they can.

As a person who has been a non-corporate scientist for 25 years, I strongly endorse this text. It walks the reader through the many hideously-flawed legal "arguments" that have set the stage for travesties of justice, based on scientific misinformation and distortion through the years. Most of the American public (and the lawyers who toady to it) wants to believe what it believes on the basis of intuition and supposition rather than objective evidence, and Huber shows why this is an altogether-invalid approach. The reviewer who gave this book a one-star rating is a plaintiff's attorney-- I would "make book" on that.

Since the mid-1970s there has been a movement to second-guess modern environmentalism. A recent book that makes extensive use of history in its critique is by Peter Huber, Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists, A Conservative Manifesto. Huber is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and writes regular columns for Forbes Magazine.

The title Hard Green comes from a basic distinction Huber makes between "hard green" and "soft green." Huber argues that environmentalism was invented by Teddy Roosevelt, who when
using the term "conservation" really meant "environmental policy." T.R. and his contemporaries had seen the loss of natural environments and the depletion of natural resources, and they experienced it as an aesthetic loss. This is hard green. Hard greens believe the only real scarcity results from loss of wilderness. Since humans live on the surface of the planet, conserving the surface is what counts, and human needs should be provided not by exploiting the surface but by mining materials from beneath the surface.

According to Huber, T.R.'s environmentalism was complete; nothing needed to be added. But then, according to Huber, there arose a new environmentalism in the late 1970s that is concerned
with invisible threats. This is soft green. Soft greens see threats in phenomena that are highly dispersed or distant in time, phenomena that can only be found by computer modeling. Soft greens follow the Precautionary Principle. They assume that if high doses of a substance are harmful, low doses must be harmful too.

However well intentioned it is, Huber argues, soft is not truly green, for it lacks a sense of proportion. Soft green programs are prescriptive and complex and must be administered by large bureaucracies. Soft green computer models over-predict harms. Soft green economic theories are unrealistic and conjectural. Soft green remedies, which spend resources to redress imaginary harms, do not in the end conserve wilderness; to the contrary, they reduce wealth, which is what truly produces green. Thus, ironically, soft green programs ultimately produce environmental degradation. Huber considers soft green morally corrupt, likening it to communism.

The hard green manifesto is to save the environment from the softs. In other words, the distinction Huber's makes is between 'right green' and 'wrong green.'

One of the pleasures in reading Hard Green is keeping up with Huber's hard-driving intellect. Huber offers very perceptive critiques of classic environmental theories, including Malthus'
population hypothesis, the tragedy of the commons, and the theory of externalities. Huber argues that these doctrines err, first by not recognizing that nature repairs itself, and second by not considering human adaptation through market processes. For these reasons, Huber argues, the projected environmental disasters have not occurred and will not in the future.

But Hard Green also contains unsettling discrepancies. For example, Huber presents the hard/soft distinction as a clean differentiation between traditional conservation and modern environmentalism. But this creates difficulty in knowing how to address modern environmental problems such as air pollution. Modern air pollution problems are categorically distinct in character from those that were recognized before the mid-20th Century. How does the hard green philosophy deal with modern air pollution? Not very well, actually. While Huber asserts that hard greens are concerned about pollution, he notes that their concern runs only to the aesthetics of pollution. That is, the reason pollution is unacceptable is that it is ugly. It also follows, taking his premise out to its logical extension, that unseen substances must be harmless. Thus, a hard green would be concerned about a visible smoke nuisance but not the toxicological effects of smoke's chemical constituents. Nor would a hard green be concerned about lead exhausted from leaded gasoline, toxic industrial emissions, or exposure to radiation, all of which have toxic properties that are not visible. All of these implications contradict what we have learned over the last fifty years.

To rescue the hard green concept from the observation that it is inapplicable to modern environmental problems, Huber admits that unseen substances might be harmful. But his rescue effort only digs itself deeper by arguing in addition that since one cannot know which substances are the harmful ones nothing should be done about them as a class and that their harm will be mitigated by dilution.

The only consistent thread running through this set of arguments is Huber's denial that modern environmental problems should be addressed as such. Taken literally, Huber's argument defines
them into nonexistence. Indeed, one gets the sense that since he doesn't like the remedies for modern environmental problems he has to deny their existence so that the remedies won't be
necessary. Defining away modern environmental problems makes it unnecessary to address the practical questions associated with them: how to determine the extent of such hazards? how to assign responsibilities? who shall be liable for breach of a responsibility? With modern environmental problems defined into non-existence, early 20th Century conservation approaches are all that is required.

And so, when one plays out Huber's argument one finds it difficult to accept for two fundamental reasons: (1) that modern environmental problems are categorically different in nature from early 20th Century conservation, and (2) that in consequence T.R. couldn't have meant "environmental policy" when he said "conservation" because the kind of problems that gave rise to environmental policy as we know the term now had not occurred yet. Thus, it is an anachronism for Huber to call T.R. an "environmentalist," at least as we use the term now, and that mistake leads to unwarranted inferences.

In all, Hard Green is a provocative work that because of its persistent application of central ideas to all manner of policy questions could become, as touted, a conservative manifesto. But
the historian is challenged to examine the quality of the factual premises upon which the whole construct is based.

This book sets out a comprehensive conservative position on the environment, declaring that Hard Greens (conservative) share the large objectives (actual or merely claimed) of the Soft Greens (liberal), but disagree with and reject much of what they diagnose as the source of despoliation and environmental decay.

Accordingly, Hard Greens reject most of the solutions that Soft Greens prescribe. Libertarian activist Huber takes on chapter by chapter the big issues of environmental discourse, from scarcity and pollution to efficiency and waste disposal. Hard Green is a strongly argued critique of environmentalism from the political right. Huber argues that Soft Green environmental policies do exactly the opposite of what they intend, and lays out a clear program for a Hard Green approach to the environment. By making you re-examine your assumptions, this book makes the richest contribution ever made to the greening of the political mind.

This book is a must read for anyone who really cares about preserving the environment. The author has combined his knowledge of true science with a lawyer's logic to destroy old myths and chart new pathways to keeping the planet truly green.

Peter William Huber (1952- ) is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a columnist for Forbes. He holds both a doctorate in engineering from MIT and a JD from the Harvard Law School. Huber's previous books include Liability and Galileo's Revenge.

Hard Green is a persuasively written examination of the often misleading arguments and questionable "science" employed by the hard-core eco-utopian policy makers in their quest to grow their memberships and promote their, to some observers, exclusionary agendas. Recommended reading for anyone who wants to understand the methodological track record of green-advocacy groups.